DanITech Blog

What is Affiliate Marketing and how do I make money from it?
Merchants provide incentives to webmasters (Affiliates) for diverting traffic from their website or email campaigns, for example, via an advert.  Affiliates are financially rewarded either per click, lead or a percentage of a sale.

How does it work?
Affiliates are provided with code that will automatically track diverted visitors and credit an Affiliate account with the appropriate commission. Very little technical knowledge is required.

What are my options on advertising?
Advertising options include:

• Placing banners/ text links on your website/blog/emails.
• Writing reviews about a product/service/merchant.
• Advertising special promotions/discount codes.
• Providing price or product comparisons.
• Product Feeds.

DanITech use a combination of the above, for example, we run a Designer Clothes website which is based solely around Affiliate Marketing. We advertise special offers, discount codes and provide links to merchants and our recommended items of clothing.  

What products/services should I advertise?
It is very tempting to sign up with Merchants who offer the highest commission or incentives but in order to ensure the highest conversion rates, you should always choose products or services that are relevant to, and/or compliment, your website.  

How do I get started?
A number of websites provide Affiliate Programs direct or you can gain access to hundreds of merchants via Affiliate Networks.

Which Affiliate Networks can you recommend?
DanITech regularly use and highly recommend the following:

Affiliate Window: affiliatewindow.com
Affiliate Future: affiliatefuture.co.uk
Webgains: webgains.com

What is Google Adsense?
Google Adsense is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program enabling webmasters to display Google Ads on their website or blog. Google will crawl your site to ensure that the adverts are based, where possible, on the content of your site and your target audience, ensuring the best conversion rates.

Is it easy to set up?
Yes. Once you have signed up for your free Google Adsense account and your application approved, you will be provided with a snippet of HTML code which you can simply copy and paste into your site, so you can be up and running within minutes. 

There are a wide range of advertisements to choose from that can be customised to suit the style of your site, including text and images. Another great feature is the Google Search Box providing your site with its very own search engine that displays content driven ads on the results pages.

How much can I expect to earn from Google Adsense?
This is hard to predict as you earn an undisclosed percentage of the amount paid by an Advertiser to Google per click. Therefore, much depends on the current rate being paid for certain keywords included in the topics covered by your site, where you place the adverts and of course the volume of visitors. Google claim that the only way to find out how much you are going to earn, is to sign up and give it a go!

When will I get paid?
Once your account reaches $100 in unpaid revenue, Google will, depending on your location, send payment by cheque/electronic transfer at the end of the following month. Payments are made subject to certain terms to include providing your tax details and address.

What if I don’t want to drive traffic to a competitor website?
Google Adsense provides a Competitive Ad Filter to prevent competitors appearing on your site.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro blog service which enables you to post immediate updates (”tweets”) of up to 140 characters in answer to the question “what are you doing?”. It is a service that allows your friends and family (”followers”) to stay up to date with your updates, thoughts, whereabouts etc via the web, Instant Messenger (IM) or by text messages.

Twitter as a Business Tool
Whilst predominately a social networking site, businesses are also adopting the Twitter services as a powerful marketing tool to develop relationships with their clients by announcing news headlines, special offers, customer support and feedback etc.

Your “tweets” can be imported to your website/blog or alternatively, TwitterFeed is a service that directs your blog/rss into your Twitter account,  whilst developers can use the API to make their own Twitter tools.

Twitter: http://twitter.com
TwitterFeed: http://twitterfeed.com
Twitter Fan Wiki: http://twitter.pbwiki.com

What is a Favicon?
A favicon (the abbreviation for ‘favourites icon’ and also known as a shortcut icon) is a small logo that visitors will see in their browser’s address bar when they visit a website or when they add a site to their favourites. It is a great way to add brand recognition to a website and distinguishes a site from others when a visitor views their favourites menu.

FireFox support animated favicons and it is believed that other browsers will soon follow suit:  

Basic Tutorial: How do I create a Favicon?

1. Create an image 16×16 pixels using your favourite graphic editor such as Photoshop, Microsoft Paint etc.
2. To convert the graphic into an icon file, we recommend the following on-line tool:

   http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

3. Upload the favicon.ico to the root directory on your webserver, you can verify that it has been uploaded correctly by typing: http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico (replace yoursite.com with your website’s address);
4. Add the following code to the <HEAD> of your web pages (at the very least your home/index page):

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" >